


The Stuff of Legends

by ZombieBabs



Series: Legendary (Modern Witcher AU) [1]
Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Haunting, Magic, Minor Violence, No knowledge of the Witcher games needed, PNWS Holiday Exchange 2016, Secret Santa, Sorceress!Coralee, Witcher AU, Witcher!Strand, Wraith, pnwsholidayexchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 20:48:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8911387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZombieBabs/pseuds/ZombieBabs
Summary: It takes Alex Reagan eleven calls before the witcher calls her back.By this point, she’s a little desperate.





	

**Author's Note:**

> My gift to [icarusinstatic](http://icarusinstatic.tumblr.com/) on tumblr. Hope you like it!
> 
> You shouldn't need any knowledge of the Witcher books/games to read this. But if you have any questions or need clarification, let me know.

It takes Alex Reagan eleven calls before the witcher calls her back.

By this point, she’s a little desperate. 

He leaves her a message, which she listens to just before she leaves the offices of the Pacific Northwest Stories building. It’s getting late and she refuses to be caught alone in the building after the sun has gone down.

Not with the ghost.

His message is more halting--awkward, really--than she expects from a man centuries old. But she’s heard that witchers are strange beings. Not quite human, not with the genetic modifications that allow them to do their work, they tend to keep to themselves. Alex puts his lack of social graces down as the cost of doing business and flees the building for the night.

The important thing is that he’s coming.

After months of being haunted, Alex is ready to put the entire experience behind her.

The next day, she makes arrangements with the witcher’s receptionist, Melissa. The woman is all smiles on the other end of the phone, reminding Alex--before they even discuss any of the particulars--that witchers never work for free. She repeats this several times, as if it isn’t a well-known fact that the Witcher Code demands witchers to be compensated for their work. With none of the employees at the PNWS building working overtime, Alex assures the woman that the witcher will be well rewarded for his efforts.

Alex thinks it’s funny, a witcher with a receptionist, living in metropolitan America. The fact that the witcher will have to fly in from Chicago, in a plane, makes her laugh. In the storybooks, he would teleport with the help of a powerful sorceress. He would appear in her office, two swords strapped to his back, wearing chainmail fit for rescuing princesses.

Instead, he rents a car from the airport and pulls into the parking lot like any other visitor. 

He strides into the offices wearing a dark suit, a tie around his neck, no weapons in sight. He’s tall, towering at over six and a half feet. His hair is just as dark as his suit, a stark contrast to his pale skin. 

What really captures Alex’s attention, however, are his eyes. She manages a brief glance at them after he slides his sunglasses off his face, before he turns to the receptionist at the front desk, but it’s enough to make Alex’s breath catch.

They’re blue. The bluest blue that Alex has ever seen. But unlike human eyes, his pupils are slit-shaped, sliver-thin in the well-lit lobby. They remind Alex of a cat lounging in the sunlight.

“Wow,” Alex says under her breath as the witcher signs in with the front desk.

“You’re telling me,” Nic says. He purses his lips for a low whistle.

Alex laughs. She supposes, after one gets used to the fact that the man before them is actually a witcher, one come to life straight out of the old legends, the man is handsome enough. “Don’t you have a show to record?”

Nic grins. “What can I say, I’m here for moral support.”

Alex slaps his shoulder with a grin of her own. “Get out of here before I tell your girlfriend that you’re making eyes at other people.”

Nic laughs and puts his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Fine, fine. Let’s just hope this guy is as good as they say he is.”

“I assure you. I am.”

Nic’s tanned face turns a bright, cherry red. He turns slowly to face the witcher. “Sorry. I didn’t hear you coming.”

The witcher smiles. It’s lopsided. Alex notes a scar bisecting his lips on one side. It gives his smile a wry quality, as if he knows the answer to a riddle that has the rest of the world stumped. He holds out a hand for Alex to shake, then Nic. “Richard Strand.”

“Thanks for coming, Dr. Strand. I’m Alex Reagan and this is my producing partner, Nic Silver.”

“Really,” Nic says. “We’re happy to have you.”

The witcher stands there, expectant. Alex shakes herself into action. “Why don’t you follow me back to my office? We can discuss the, uh, haunting?”

Strand nods.

Nic gives Alex and the witcher two thumbs up as they go by.

Strand is quiet behind her as she leads him through the halls of the Pacific Northwest Stories building. She wonders what he can see with his strange cat eyes. Do ghosts leave behind a trail that only witchers can see? Has their ghost left any sort of spectral evidence behind?

“This is it,” Alex says, gesturing for him to enter her office before her.

He sits when she offers him a seat, crossing his legs, his hands folded on his lap. He looks like a businessman, more than anything else. Certainly not an ancient genetically modified warrior.

“How long, exactly, have you been experiencing this haunting?” he asks, getting straight to the point.

Alex has to think back for a moment. “Six months, at least.”

“Have you or anyone at these studios experienced any tragedy in the last six months? Something that would have occurred at the office?”

“No, nothing like that.”

The witcher watches her carefully. “I have to ask, have you or your peers actually seen the ghost?”

Alex frowns. “No one has caught anything on camera, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Strand smiles. If Alex isn’t mistaken, it looks a little indulgent. “Specters don’t show up on camera, I’m afraid.”

“I’m sorry, specters?”

“They’re what people typically refer to when they describe a haunting. In my experience, however, these days ghosts are a simple product of apophenia.”

She suddenly wishes that she’d asked the witcher to sign a waiver. She’d give anything to be able to record their conversation. “Apophenia?”

“The human mind is quick to recognize patterns. Even forcing supernatural meaning onto random data, or events. It’s the phenomena that occurs when people perceive faces in clouds or hear demonic voices in records played backwards. And the more a person wants to believe, well.” Strand lifts his shoulder in a small shrug.

Alex is good at reading between the lines. Especially when the lines are big and bold and slightly condescending. “So, you’re saying that our brains have tricked us into thinking there is a ghost in the studios? Because we want to believe that we’re being haunted? Isn’t that just a little patronizing?”

“Not when it’s the truth. Over the centuries, witchers have hunted so-called monsters to extinction. The creatures have died out, but the stories remain. It’s simple human survival instinct that keeps that fear alive, that allows one to assume that they are being haunted when they hear noises in an otherwise unoccupied room.”

Alex sits back. She clamps down on her automatic annoyance. “I still think you shouldn’t ignore a person’s subjective experience, before you know all the details.”

Strand mimics her posture, sitting back in his own chair. He meets her challenging stare with one of practiced detachment. “And what details am I missing, Ms. Reagan?”

“We have seen it. The ghost, or the specter, or whatever.”

The witcher blinks. “You said--”

“And you assumed,” Alex interrupts. “I said we haven’t caught it on camera. We don’t have physical proof, but we have seen it.”

“Tell me.” Strand’s words are heavy with authority. If his hands had moved, Alex would have sworn that he’d cast some kind of witcher magic on her. But his hands haven’t so much as twitched in his lap.

“Where do I even start?” Alex asks.

“I need to know everything. What it looks like, what time of day you’ve encountered it. Has anyone been hurt because of it?”

“Now that you mention it, we did find an intern collapsed in the hallway one morning. She was staying late, doing some research. It comes out at night, and ever since we found her, no one has been allowed to stay after dark. She isn’t possessed now or anything, is she?”

Strand shakes his head. His cat-eyed stare is still difficult for Alex to get used to. “Of course not. Your intern was lucky not to have been killed. Specters have only jealousy and hatred for humanity.” He pauses. “Have you seen this ‘ghost?’ Can you describe its appearance?”

Alex has seen the ghost. Out of everyone in the office, in fact, Alex has seen it the most amount of times. She shudders at the memory. “It floats, several feet off the ground. It’s wearing some kind of dress, with a hood pulled over its face. It shrieks--loud, so loud--but the sound feels like it’s coming from inside my head. It’s blinding.”

“A wraith,” Strand says, more to himself than to Alex. “But, how--?”

Alex shrugs. “That’s why we called you. You’re supposed to be the best. We’ve had mediums and priests and anyone else we could think of to get rid of it, yet nothing has worked. Please, we really need your expertise.” 

The witcher ducks his head. “I’m not one of the best. Just one of the last of my kind.” He hesitates, then looks back up at Alex. “I believe you’ve already discussed matters regarding compensation with my assistant?”

“Then you’ll do it? You’ll do your witcher thing and get rid of the--what did you call it? The wraith?”

Strand’s crooked smile returns. “I’ll do my ‘witcher thing,’ as you put it so eloquently, yes. It seems I have some actual work to do.”

Alex nearly claps her hands in delight. She stops herself before she can do anything embarrassing, but only by putting her hands down on her desk and using them to push herself up onto her feet. “What do you need to get started?”

The witcher stands. “I’ll need full access to the studios. I may need to talk to those who have seen the wraith, get their story. I need to find out why the wraith would appear here, of all places, when you say you haven’t had any tragedy to tie a wraith to this place.”

“My executive producers should have spoken to everyone already, to let them know you were coming.”

They stand there, facing each other, for a long, awkward moment. 

Strand clears his throat. “Yes, well, I should get to it.”

Alex laughs. “Oh. Right. I should probably get back to work. You know where I am if you need anything.”

Strand’s eery eyes flicker with some sort of emotion, but it’s too quickly hidden for Alex to register. “I thought you might accompany me. You know these studios better than I, I mean.”

Alex’s eyes go wide. “I thought witchers tended to work alone?”

“We do. To keep others safe. You’ve said this particular wraith comes out after dark, however. You should be safe enough until then.”

Alex looks down at her desk. Her recorder is sitting on top of a pile of paperwork, just where she’d left it.

The witcher follows her gaze, a small frown pulling at his lips. “You would like to record this?”

Alex smiles, feeling sheepish. “I’ll kick myself later if I don’t, at least, ask. I am a reporter, after all. And I’ve never actually worked with a witcher before.”

Strand’s eyes narrow in thought. “It isn’t normally done,” he says.

Alex deflates. “Oh. Okay.”

Strand holds up a hand. “But my publicist would be ecstatic.”

Richard Strand is not only a witcher. He holds two doctorates, with rumors of his working on a third. He’s written several books--none of them on his exploits as a witcher, but academic books in psychology, history, and religion. He teaches classes in Universities all across the globe.

Alex could produce a piece on Richard Strand, the man, all on his own. That he’s a also witcher, a man who has lived hundreds of years and has saved countless lives by destroying monsters long gone extinct, Alex can’t hold back her own enthusiasm about the story. “Thank you!”

Strand smiles. “As I said, you would be doing my publicist a favor.”

Alex has him sign a waiver, giving her permission to use his voice and feature him in her story. It gives her an idea for a series, something about people with interesting jobs. Her executive producers have been in talks about breaking into the podcasting sphere. Perhaps, once the PNWS building is no longer being plagued by a wraith, she’ll bring the pitch to their attention.

He signs the document with a flourish. For an instant, Alex can picture him signing parchment with a quill and ink. She blinks the image away and puts the sheet of paper in the pile on her desk to be digitized later.

Alex has given tours to many a donor, during her years working at Pacific Northwest Stories. She takes Strand along the same route, reciting the same history as she’s done in the past. Alex finds the witcher to be attentive, if quiet. He doesn’t ask as many questions about the studios as she is usually prepared to answer. But his eyes are quick to take in his surroundings. Like a predator scoping out prey, they move first to study the people they encounter and then the objects in the room around them.

Once, Alex notices him trailing behind her and turns to see him scrunching his nose.

“Is everything okay?”

He shakes his head. “I apologize. Someone is wearing perfume. It’s...very familiar.”

Alex waits for him to catch up. She glances up at him, noting the stony mask he’s arranged his expression into. She has the feeling that he doesn’t want to talk about the _someone_ that the perfume had reminded him of. 

“Your mutations,” she starts, hesitant. When he looks down at her, his eyebrow cocked in question, she continues. “They heighten your senses?”

“Yes.”

“That must be really overwhelming. With so many people packed into cities as tightly as they are.”

The witcher blinks, surprised. “It can be. Witchers are trained to tune out extraneous information, however.”

“But the perfume?”

“It was simply...unexpected.”

He shuts down after that. Alex’s instincts as a reporter tell her not to push, as much as she may want to. She can sense that there is an interesting story behind his silence, but from the set of his shoulders, Alex knows that it’s a story that he isn’t ready to share.

As he investigates each sighting of the wraith and interview witnesses to the specter, Alex is content to watch the witcher work. She leaves herself several audio notes, so that she will be able to better provide details during voice over work, but she tries her best to play the part of participant observer. 

Finally, after following the trail of _something_ that Alex could not see, he turns to her. They’re in one of the recording studios, the one that Alex typically frequents. He points to the desk and asks, “Where did you get that?”

Alex looks down, but she can’t see anything out of the ordinary. “Get what?”

“The bracelet. Where did it come from?”

Alex’s gaze moves to the bracelet. It’s a delicate gold chain with a heart-shaped pendant. The initials KM are engraved into the pendant in elaborate script. “It was sent to us by one of our listeners. We were doing a story about a woman who was--”

Alex stops, her eyes going wide. She raises them to meet the witcher’s stare. “She was murdered. In a park. The letter said it was from a listener who suffered a similar loss. She said that she wanted to gift the bracelet to the studio, as a way to thank us for helping her to move on.”

The witcher frowns. “May I?”

Alex gestures for him to do what he needs to with the bracelet. He picks it up, lifts it in front of his face between two fingers. His cat-eyes squint at it. Finally, he takes a delicate sniff.

“I thought I was mistaken,” he murmurs. 

Alex holds her recorder out, in order to catch his words. “About what?”

He shakes his head. “The perfume. It hasn’t been manufactured for the last two hundred years.”

Alex frowns. “But you said you smelled it before? In the offices?”

“Yes. I thought, perhaps, it was a duplicate scent. That it had been recreated, somehow.”

“But it isn’t?”

“No.”

Alex has to fight not to let her frustration win out. One word, cryptic answers are an excellent way to stir up drama, after all. The eventual reveal will be good for her story. But it doesn’t make her interview any easier when she has to drag answers out of her subject. “Then, what is the significance?”

“There is a sorceress I was once,” he coughs, “involved with.”

Alex waits.

“She used to wear this particular perfume.”

Alex bites her bottom lip in thought. “So, you think she had something to do with this? With the wraith?”

“Yes,” he says, without any hesitation. “The question is why?”

“Did you and this sorceress--” Alex cannot believe that she’s just uttered the word in reference to a real live person, “Did you both part on good terms?”

Strand opens his mouth and then shuts it. He looks away from Alex, down at some notes left on the desk next to the microphone. “No. We did not.”

Again, Alex wants to ask what happened with this mysterious someone, but the look of pain deep in his eyes stops her. 

Strand seems to shake himself out of his thoughts. “There is nothing more I can do. Not until after dark. Do you have somewhere would I could meditate? Somewhere quiet.”

Alex can’t help the strange looks she gives him. It’s hard to keep her lips from lifting into an incredulous smile. “You want to meditate? Here?”

“I need to retrieve something from the car, first. But yes, if I will not be in your way.”

“Sure,” she says, finally giving into the smile. “I don’t think this studio is booked for recording today.”

She leads him back to the lobby. She waits, watching the witcher through the glass doors as he pops the trunk of his rental car open and pulls out a large, black case. It looks almost like something one would carry a musical instrument in. Or a case for a sniper rifle, one where all the pieces of the rifle are disassembled into in movies. Strand carries it at his side as if it weighs nothing.

Alex walks with him back to the empty recording studio. She’s proud of herself for not having asked about the case, but isn’t able to keep her silence once Strand sets the case down on the desk. “Is that some kind of witcher gear?”

By answer, Strand flips the latches open with a click and lifts the lid of the case.

There are glass bottles of different liquids, some of them disgusting looking, some glowing faintly, packed with foam. And a sword. A gleaming, silver sword.

“Holy shit,” Alex says.

The witcher breathes a soft laugh. 

Alex’s hand reaches out to touch the sword, hardly able to believe her eyes, but she remembers her manners at the last moment. Instead, she traces the air just above it. “It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

Alex looks up to see the witcher smiling at her. “Is it very old?”

“Very,” Strand confirms.

“I thought witchers used two swords? One made from steel and the other made from silver. That’s what the stories say.”

“Steel swords aren’t used for much more than practice these days, I’m afraid. Not since wolves and bandits have stopped being a plague to general society.”

Alex eyes are drawn down to his scarred lips. She wonders whether it was a beast or a bandit that had caused the injury. Or something altogether. Another wraith, perhaps?

Strand’s hands move to the buttons of his suit jacket. He shrugs out of it and hangs it on the back of the chair. Without any regard to his slacks, he kneels down onto the floor. Without another word, closes his eyes.

She stands there awkwardly for a few moments, watching his rise of his chest slow as he controls his breathing. He opens one eye and smiles crookedly. “You do not need to wait. Sundown is not for several hours. After that, please leave the building along with the rest of the staff. The wraith should be gone by tomorrow morning.”

Alex leaves and shuts the door behind her. She hangs the Studio In Use sign on the door and switches off her recorder. 

For the rest of the day, Alex finds it difficult to keep her attention on her work. She has several stories in progress, but all she can think about is the witcher meditating in the studio half-way across the building. Is it true what they say about witchers? That they don’t sleep, but meditate once they begin to feel tired? Do they do so to simply pass the time? If Strand weren’t so busy filling his nearly immortal life with writing and teaching and investigations, would he meditate the days away? The same way a regular person might nap away an afternoon?

With a silent apology to Nic for avoiding her deadlines, Alex manages to scrape together some research on witchers. There is surprisingly little information available. Most of what she fines are faerie tale-like stories, passed down from generation to generation.

She reads about a witcher who saved children from being dragged out of a village by something called a grave-hag. She finds an account of a man saved from a pack of creatures called drowners by a witcher. There is even an entry in an ancient account book detailing a contract between a baron and a witcher. Most of it has been lost to time, but Alex can make out something about a nest of ghouls.

By the time she downloads a few credible articles from JSTOR and buys a couple of books from one of the rare historians who have specialized in witcher legend, Alex doesn’t realize how late it’s gotten. She checks the time on her computer and feels her insides freeze.

She doesn’t have the luxury of a window in her office. She hadn’t realized that the sun had gone down.

Alex shivers.

It feels almost as if someone is watching her. But besides the witcher, Alex should be alone in the building.

Except for the wraith.

She hears it before she sees it. The wraith screams, a sound full of pain and rage. Alex catches a glimpse of a tattered skirt, floating somewhere at eye-level just in her periphery, and nearly upends her desk in her haste to get out of her office. She crashes into the closed door, bruising her shoulder in the process of getting it open without losing any momentum. It slams into the wall behind it, but Alex doesn’t turn around to inspect the damage. 

The wraith screams again. It sounds close, but Alex can’t waste precious seconds looking behind her.

“Dr. Strand!” she yells. The sound echoes in the empty halls. “Help!” 

Unlike ghosts in TV and film, the wraith doesn’t phase through walls. Alex counts her few blessings, knowing there would be no way she could outrun the specter if it did. She’s sprinting faster than she’s ever run in her life, yelling for the witcher as she does.

She turns, still running, to see the wraith at the end of the hall, its hood covering most of its horrible mummified face. All Alex can see clearly is its mouth, open in a hate-fueled scream.

Alex collides with a wall she could swear wasn’t in front of her. She falls back on her ass and tries to scramble back to her feet.

The wall, it turns out, is the witcher. Strand stands there with his shirt sleeves pushed up above his elbows, the buttons at his neck undone, revealing a pendant that Alex hadn’t noticed before. He’s holding a sword in his hands, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. He steps around Alex, blocking her with his body.

“Get out of here,” he says.

Alex cannot move. From shock or terror, she doesn’t know, but her limbs are frozen in place.

“Alex, run!”

All she can do is shake her head.

The witcher spares her no further attention. He drops his stance, lowering his center of gravity. He holds the sword up in a defensive position with one hand while his other does something that looks like sign language.

The floor underneath the witcher glows purple in a circle around him.

He signs again--this sign different--and his body shines gold.

Strand remains in the ring of witcher magic. He waits for the wraith to approach. It circles Strand, looking for an opening.

Strand doesn’t give it one.

Finally, the wraith crosses the glowing purple boundary.

And shrieks. Alex slaps both of her hands over her ears, but, of course, it does no good. It feels like the scream is inside of her, reverberating in her mind just behind her eyes. She doesn’t dare shut them, however. 

Strand wobbles and shakes his head. His grip tightens on the hilt of the silver sword. With his heightened senses and his close proximity to the wraith, Alex has no idea how he’s even still standing. 

The wraith swipes at Strand with a shriveled, clawed hand. It’s reach is far greater than Strand’s. He dodges it, still inside the magic circle that seems to have trapped the wraith within its confines, but doesn’t try to retaliate. He stands strong, waiting for the right moment to strike.

Howling, the wraith dives toward Strand. Its claws are outstretched, ready to tear the witcher to pieces.

Strand slashes at them with his sword. He catches one with a blow that would have shorn a human’s hand from its body. Alex expects blood and gore, but the wraith only recoils. It bares rotten teeth at Strand. 

“Alex,” Strand calls. He doesn’t move his eyes from the wraith. “It’s going to make several copies of itself. Stay where you are. I’ll protect you.”

Alex manages a nod, which she knows he cannot see.

A moment later, the purple circle disappears. With another shriek, the wraith raises its arms above its hooded head.

In the span of only a blink, Alex and Strand are surrounded by wraiths. Each one is a perfect copy of the original.

Strand slowly backs toward Alex.

She feels suddenly heavy, exhausted. It’s the same feeling she’s had on occasion, during her encounters with the wraith in the last few months. She had attributed it to shock and fear, but the way the wraiths are grinning, Alex thinks it must be doing something to her. Stealing her energy, perhaps, like some kind of vampire, but without draining her blood.

“Please, don’t be afraid,” Strand says. He places his hand on her face, his thumb sweeping across her cheekbone.

Alex feels a rush of warmth. Her skin begins to glow a bright gold.

“It’s a shield,” he explains. “I’m going to try to draw the wraith away from here.”

Without any warning, Strand charges the wraiths that has appeared behind her. His sword goes through each specter, as if it had never been there, in the first place.

The wraiths on the other side are drawing closer to Alex. “Dr. Strand!”

He won’t be able to get to her on time.

Alex cowers as one of the wraiths close in on her, a second one just behind the first. She screams and squeezes her eyes shut.

There is a sound like the links of a chain shattering. Alex can feel a rush of wind and opens her eyes to see both wraiths knocked backwards. One dissolves into nothing. The other screams in rage.

Strand stalks passed her, the tip of his sword pointed toward the floor. “I cannot cast the shield spell again so soon. Go. Run!”

Alex scrabbles backwards until she can get her feet underneath her. She runs in the opposite direction of Strand and the wraith, her heart beating like a hammer in her chest. She runs through empty hallways, all the way into the lobby. She bursts through the front doors and into the parking lot.

But she can’t make herself run any further than that. 

The witcher is still in the building, still fighting the specter. 

She knows that he’s an expert. She knows that he’s probably fought tens, if not hundreds, of wraiths over his long lifetime. But the witcher had saved her life. She _has_ to know the outcome.

And, surely, the fight could not last until morning? 

Surely, he should be emerging from the building, soon? Victorious, as in the old legends?

But as the minutes stretch on, Alex has to stop herself from re-entering the building.

What if the wraith had gotten the best of him? What if Strand had wasted a crucial shield spell on her? What if he was lying, bleeding--perhaps even dead--somewhere in the studios?

Before the guilt can become too much, however, Alex sees something just beyond the glass doors.

The witcher.

Strand pushes through one of the doors, his sword held by his side. There is blood trickling down his face from a gash hidden somewhere beyond his hairline. But, otherwise, he appears whole. He isn’t even out of breath. 

“It’s gone,” he says.

“You’re hurt,” Alex says, rushing up to him.

“Just a scratch. It should heal as soon as I get another chance to meditate.”

Alex shakes her head, releasing a relieved sigh. “It’s like you’re a superhero or something. I can’t believe you killed it.”

Strand laughs. “I have gotten that a few times in my life.”

Placing her hand on his arm, Alex makes sure to catch his cat-eyed gaze. “Thank you. For saving my life. And for getting rid of the wraith.”

He ducks his head, a small smile playing out on his lips. “As a witcher, compensation is all the thanks I need.”

Alex squeezes his arm. “Still, I appreciate it. And I’m glad that you’re alright. I was worried, when you didn’t come out.”

He looks at her, his brows drawn down in an endearing sort of confusion. “You...were?”

“Of course.” Squeezing his arm once more, Alex takes a step back. “What’s the next step? Do we need to get the building blessed or something?”

Laughing, the witcher shakes his head. “Nothing like that. I burned the bracelet and destroyed the wraith. It shouldn’t be making a return without something to tie it to this realm.”

“I’m sensing that there is more,” Alex says. “For instance, why would your sorceress send us the bracelet?”

“Coralee isn’t mine. Not anymore,” he says. He sighs. “I think, perhaps, she was attempting to lure me here. I’m the only witcher in North America, it would be logical to assume that I would be the one to answer your call. For what purpose? I cannot say.”

Alex and Strand make their way back inside the building. She watches him pack his gear with a strange sadness lurking somewhere in her chest.

“Well, witcher,” Alex says, as soon as he snaps his case closed. “I guess this is goodbye.”

Without looking at her, Strand says, “It doesn’t have to be.”

Alex blinks, taken aback. “No?”

“There have been more cases like this. More than usual. Perhaps linked to Coralee, perhaps not. But, I thought, for your story--”

He cuts himself off. He looks up at her through a fringe of messy black hair. 

“You’d like me to document your investigation?”

Strand nods. “If you wouldn’t be adverse to it. Since it is not a contract, you would not need to give me any sort of payment for--”

He stops, realizing that Alex is smiling at him. He looks at her more fully. “You are not adverse to it?”

Alex laughs. “Are you kidding? Of course I’m not adverse to it. When do we start?”

“As soon as you are able.”

Alex sticks out her hand, waits for the witcher to grasp it in his own, much larger one. She shakes it. “It’s a deal. I’m ready to go when you are.”


End file.
